Major Project: Mr Plimsolls Model Progress- Rigging and Skinning

Fig 1: Mr Plimsolls' Rig

Fig 2: Mr Plimsolls' Skinning

Fig 3: Example of the "Rubberhose" Rig working on skinned Mr Plimsolls 01

Fig 4: Example of the "Rubberhose" Rig working on Skinned Mr Plimsolls 02

After the Submission for the Minor Project, I went back to refine the rig on Mr Plimsolls as Alan informed me that there was some rotations in the Shoulder and Elbow joints which lead to me redoing the entire rig. While attempting to fix this issue I realised that there was an issue with the pole vector constraint when adding a pole vector to the IK Handle.

I came to the conclusion that it was due to the way that the arms were originally positioned, they were slightly sloping downwards instead of being in a strict T-pose. Just to experiment I made some standard three joint arm rigs and applied IK handles to them to find out that the reason why rotations would jump on the joints happened due to the joint placement being incorrect.

To combat this I made some slight changes to the model's geometry by straightening out the arms and placing the joints in a straighter position making sure to make the only rotations made were in the joint rotations and not the world rotation. While this helped with the IK Handle issue I had slight complications with the Pole Vectors still, However after carefully following one of Alan's rigging tutorials for Jetpack Jones I was able to get it working properly.

I had a few issues with setting up the "Rubberhose" rig too, the issues mainly involving the connections and the constraints with the ribbon spines and another issue of them causing weird rotations to happen to the joints. However after fiddling with the rig, and redo the ribbon spines more times then I can count, I was able to fix the rig so that there are no sudden rotations in the joints and the controls work with the ribbon spine without that much of an issue

Overall while rigging Mr Plimsolls as been a somewhat difficult and way more convoluted then I originally thought, I'm quite happy with the progress if made with him so far, even if the issues I've had with him as pushed me back time-wise then what I would of liked.